Common Challenge

That’s just a quick note to tell our readers that we’re showing dooyt.com this weekend to a bigger audience during Democamp 2009 Poznań (www.democamp.org).
We’ll sum up this event here in a couple of days: http://www.dooyt.com/projects/view/98

One thing that we can already say is that we got some pretty positive feedback and constructive criticism also

Thanks for your patience!

dooyt.com team.

Hello Dear Readers. Our work on Dooyt is going strong now, so this blog will change it’s topic. From now on we will post only about Dooyt as a product – this will help us give you information about releases, features and so on.

I hope you’ll like this change, if you have any requests for future posts – let us know.

All best,

dooyt.com Team

Through past 2 months we had a rapid turn-back from startup community claiming it’s invulnerable to weakening economy to startups firing people because of recession. The common argument for invulnerability was a) businesses having actual business models (as opposed to the first .com boom), and b) businesses with ad-revenue, but mostly performance based. The second argument is something I want to discuss.

For past 3 years the strongest point of performance based advertising was the win-win approach – both publishers and marketers had strong interest in advertising actually working. The first group earned more if more people interacted with ad, the second group got more valuable interaction, so it was willing to pay more for it. A perfect situation, both parties playing the same game. Of course many abuses, scams and other forms of violating rules of the game occured but overall the system was far superior to other forms of advertising.

There is a theory (supported by some evidence) that advertising expenditures go up in a weakening economy – based on the presuposition that you need to put more effort into selling those same products. The problem with performace based advertising here, is that people need to interact with it in order to generate revenue for the publisher. This indicates that the customer must be in search for something or ready to buy certain products to notice the ad in the first place (again, relevance used to be another selling point for PBA), and has motivation (and means) to satisfy his need. In a weak economy however, people cut back on everything, and generally are in the ‘not buying’ mode. This means they will not use search engine to look for products, and they will not click on other (no matter how relevant) ads, banners and so on. This way, the strongest point of PBA could also become it’s weakest point in the next 2 years.

There is hope, fear not. The first thing that could happen is the ‘price per click’ could go up, as more advertisers compete for the same place. The other area are branches of economy that thrive in a recession: job seeking, entrepreneurship, financial advice and others. Overall those effects could balance each other. But we have to wait 2 years to find out

I just went to see Andy Budds presentation on “Designing the User Experience Curve” today. I was badly late, but I managed to catch half of the presentation. Afterwards I took Andy, Marcin Jagodziński (of blip.pl) and Michael Sliwinski (of Nozbe.com) to coffee-shop, for what turned out to be a great conversation.

I will not write about the content of presentation, here, but I would like to share some thoughts I had during and after our meeting. One of the questions I asked Andy was should a startup deploy a half-baked product asap, or rather polish it to get the perfect user experience. His opinion was that, granted you have necessary resources, you should always go for quality. He even used the Rio vs iPod example – Rio being first to market by 3 years, but eventually leaving polished iPod to dominate.

We also had a discussion about customization, personalization and user’s tastes. Andy thinks that personalization is very important particularly in social apps – where you can show off with your personalized space. On the other hand, Michael said that we don’t want users to customize our apps too much, because then we can’t control the quality and experience of the user (Andy strongly supported that). Marcin haid his point on that one, coming from Blip’s experiences – that sometimes you have to give your users features that they use anyway, but not in a comfortable way (he used sending pictures over Blip as an example).

The presentation (and conversation afterwards) was highly inspiring, and also a bit humiliating for my ‘design-ego’. Andy really shows a completely different level of thinking about UI and design in general. But this paragraph is not about waxing Andy’s bottom. It’s about how sitting four people at a table can develop the conversation. I’m (by far) not an expert in design. Michael is actually a great marketer (in my opinion), and Marcin is an expert on coding (as far as other people say). Together, with Andy’s expertise we had a great conversation on design (of course), web startup market, VC funding and economy slowdown. My point here is that your knowledge compounds with sharing. So share, People. Share your ideas, expertise and thoughts. Share your dreams. Because sharing is power.

I was just going through my Dooyt work and I realised that the last post was on the 24th of July. This is unacceptable, and I humbly ask for your forgiveness. I will change these poor statistics in coming days. The first post – tomorrow after seeing Andy Budd of Clear:Left in Warsaw Institute of Technology.

Oh, and btw.: Dooyt is going into very-private-beta on Monday

I was just watching EpicFu on Revision3 and I had a little revelation when arriving at ‘user comments’ section. They were all Seesmic. Now, I used to think Seesmic was rubbish until I read that, but even afterwards I didn’t really see it as a viable business. Mainly because I didn’t know exactly what was it supposed to be: a blog commenting tool, a video conversation platform? Blog comments using Seesmic always seemed a bit out of place, mainly because you had to switch your attention from quickly scanning text to watching motion picture – this used to set me off track. Public video conversations? You could easily do it on Youtube if you wanted. So, what should it really be? Why, of course – a web TV commenting tool – just check out episode of EpicFu embedded below to know exactly what I mean (you have to watch it till the end).

You may now ask – what’s in it for me? (Well, all of you except Loic of course)

You have to know your context in more ways than you (probably) are aware of. In this particular case you have to watch how users consume content that you are utilizing and check whether your medium of communication is right for them.

Negative examples (of how not to do it):

• Text ads embedded in videos – too static
• Video ads on quick access pages (such as search engines, most of blogs etc) – too short recipient attention span
• A meal in a fast-food chain that takes 15 min to prepare – just plain wrong

Positive examples:

• Seesmic in video shows – obviously
• Text ads next to search – proved
• A printable up-to-date Internet travel book – after all, who carries a laptop on a world trip?
• Zemanta plug-in – that sits next to this post helping me edit it – right where it should be, just in time

So, if you are a web-gaming startup, don’t pitch your products to consumers in places where they spend 5 second (google front page) but rather in those where they spend hours (facebook). If you are in podcasting – iTunes is far better distribution channel for you than any RSS aggregation service.

You can basically break it into 3 simple check-points you should define about both your product and context/channel :

1. What amount of time does your user spend in the distribution channel? [define attention span]
2. What is the type of content in the channel? [text, visual, auditory - define medium]
3. Is the customer expecting/requiring interaction

Or maybe you think I missed something or you have different experiences? Please, share them in comments.

Getting a ‘comment notice’ e-mail from Mashable today got me thinking – it clutters my inbox, but also it helps me track the conversations I commented on (disqus and co.comments were not very helpful with that). So I clicked the included link and followed this conversation. It served mashable at least one page view, and probably some more from other people that commented the story (thus it’s effect could be expotential instead of linear). So using the simplest possible tool Mashable helped me engage into conversation and also helped itself by increasing revenue.

Modelling it for the rest of the web-world, we should focus on helping our users interact with our content – simple RSS is not enough anymore (although it probably could be used here as well if I had an auto generated channel for posts that I commented on) – as it brings users only once. You need mechanisms that constantly remind your users that the conversation (interaction) is on, and they should take part in it.

Seek balance though – if you push too much on your users they might stop coming back at all. Give them an instant opt-out to any incoming information (but don’t cut the whole stream, just one thing that’s not currently appealing) and keep the total interaction at a reasonable level (thus reducing the overeat effect).

Photo credit (cc): afroswede

Bloggers, especially A-list ones like to trash services whenever a new and effective competitor apears. This is not a new thing by any means – when TV was announced radio was dead. When video was announced – cinema was dead. When computers were announced – books and paper were dead. But they’re all still walking. From economical point of view, a consumer here has a choice of two free products that serve a similar need (and are thus substitutes). Since the transaction cost (of for instance switching or simultaneous use) are marginal – consumer has no other incentive to choose one product over another than the utility she or he gets. On the other hand, with no usage cost consumer has absolutely no incentive to abandon either product completely. Thus one product must produce ultimately higher utility than it’s substitute to be a real winner. Which is usually the case when technological leap happens (CD to MP3 for instance).

So when someone is writing that Twitter will die because Friendfeed is here, or comments are dead because Seesmic (and Friendfeed) is here, or Myspace is dead because Facebook is here – they slept on history classes. The truth is – if you have two competing services, both of which are free (vide Radio vs TV) people will either:

1. split their attention
2. split into target groups

If #1 happens, you have to make sure to be able to give them as much access to your service as possible (so their possible attention span is longest). For comments on blog, that means they should be pulled back from Friendfeed. For Friendfeed it means posting a comment on blog and on Friendfeed should be simultaneous.

If #2 happens, you have to choose your side. That’s what  Facebook vs Myspace is all about: reality vs dreams. Someone once wrote that on FB people are who they are while on MS they show who they want to be. In other words it’s communication vs entartainment. Sometimes people get confused and that’s what happens.

In other words – it’s very unlikely that a free product would have no customers. Of course, it doesn’t mean it will survive because of business issues (such as lack of sufficient revenue), but it’s not beacuse all users will abandon it.

What it means for you? Don’t worry if you get some competition in your (free) space, even if it’s big. Focus on the user, focus on utility, and grab your market share.

Photo credit goes to: http://flickr.com/photos/eelssej_/

This is way off-topic, but I just couldn’t help myself. Everyone on blogosphere is using Twitter for communication, promotion and (sic!) spamming these days. And, of course, everyone is complaining whenever Twitter is down (which does happen quite often). There were various posts on Twitter’s scalability issues, wrong architecture and even CTO shifts. However, I haven’t read any serious analysis of Twitter’s problems. After all Skype processes a lot more date all the time and it doesn’t break anyhow (I recall just one outage – but a major one…). True – it’s not possible to have a conversation (even one-way) with 5,000 people on Skype, and this is (probably) why Twitter goes down so often. On the other hand, BitTorrent clients can communicate with hundreds of peers simultaneously with no hassle.

And then it hit me: Twitter is archaic. It is constantly trying to uphold the old client-to-server communication, which considering the scale is quite hard. Rather than focusing on scalability and performance of it’s servers it should have a totally different architecture: Peer 2 Peer. Of course – it wouldn’t be web-based then. Of course you’d have API issues. It would be harder to monetize. Maybe it is even impossible to plan. But it’s surprising no one mentioned it before. Maybe I’m wrong somewhere – I’m not an expert in architecture, – so please correct me if you have other opinion. But until no one proves me wrong, let’s face it – Twitter is archaic.

ps. (Unfortunately) After writing this I found an excellent post by Alex Iskold at RWW. He claims that changing Twitter into a protocol would not solve the technical problem (judging by Alex’s experience he may be right on that), but his argument on the looks and ‘feeling’ of twitter are less accurate, as many people use twihrl and other applications to post to and read Twitter anyway.

Usually when we begin something new we have a (more or less) clear vision on where we want to go. Sometimes we even know how we want to get there. Sometimes the how can be more important then where for us – if we are a bit idealistic… And then the life comes, so be ready to ditch your basic asumptions for final outcome’s sake.

At first we thought that while creating Dooyt.com we will also create a great company to work in, similar to Google: with free lunches, stimulated innovation and not always business oriented products. And, of course, employing thousands of people (well, in future at least). We did put a strong emphasis on structure – even though we chose distributed team for the start, with people working from their homes. We set up communication rules, we carefully chose project management methodology (SCRUM), project collaboration software (ActiveCollab) and we were planning kick-off meetings for our team. We also wanted to keep our day jobs for some (preferably short) time.

The reality proved to be a bit different:

1. It was hard to find the right people to create a great team
2. Managing HR took more time than it was worth – we didn’t have time to focus on polishing our products
3. Working our day jobs we didn’t have enough time to take care of product development and the team
4. The product development went slower than expected (mainly with us as bottlenecks)

Fortunately we are used to being elastic – so we adjusted ourselves

1. Our team is now responsible for inventing and marketing the products, and main architectural coding work.
2. The rest of the coding is and will be more and more outsourced to India
3. Simple business tasks are passed on to our Virtual Assistants, also located in India
4. With some of our time freed (thanks Tim Ferris) we are inventing new products – so expect more from us in near future

As you probably noticed, it’s not really about ditching your dreams, but rather going a bit deeper to figure out what your big dream really is. For us it turned out to be inventing great products. The side effects like creating new jobs etc. apparently can be also achieved this way – the only difference is that the people are now working in India

So whenever things don’t quite go as planned try this: 1. Go up, to find why you really started, what’s the REAL goal. 2. Then think how you can change the “how to get there” (for instance by outsourcing – try Elance for that). You’ll be surprised how elastic your assumptions can be.

And remember to let us know how it went

If you liked this post, make sure you give it a kick on DIGG or MIXX – someone might apreciate it.